Marilyn Potter is an award-winning poet and writer living in Toronto. Her poems have appeared in both Canadian and international literary journals and anthologies, been translated into Japanese, and carved into stone in Vancouver's Van Dusen Garden. Leave-Taking is her first poetry collection.
"An impressive debut from a deeply observant poet, Leave-Taking
explores the complexities of love, loss, and grief. Drawing upon
music, art, nature, and place as points of departure, the poems
alternate between recollection and attention to the present. The
result is an evocative and engaging collection."
&mdashElena Johnson, author of Field Notes for the Alpine
Tundra"Marilyn Potter's Leave-Taking is an elegy sung in lyrics of
layered tenderness and "hurt--sharp, like flint." Her poems, with
eloquence that can hover in the lived moment's contradictions,
search for "clarity [that] comes through enigmas" in memories of
love and marriage. They are also keenly attentive to the world--to
Himalayan pines in the Forest of Remembrance, the Coca-Cola bottle
someone has left on a marble slab, to clouds "dark silver / --duct
tape without the sheen." They show us how the world can hold our
grief, its petals scattered under a willow, or lodged "in a holy
pocket just above / where the trunk meets the earth." And they are
poems with news of renewal, like that of the Tamarack "--all those
needles / lying there on the ground / and every April / --like the
Fool's surprise /... silky / slippery apple-green."
--Sue Chenette, author of Slender Human Weight and The Bones of his
Being--Sue Chenette, author of Slender Human Weight and The Bones
of his Being
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